By Reg Lo
How do you increase the speed of IT?
In this 5 minute video whiteboard session I will describe two key strategies for making IT more agile and improving time to market. For your convenience there is also a transcript of the video below.
Two key strategies for increasing the speed of IT are:
- Deliver more applications using DevOps. Traditional waterfall methods are too slow. Agile methodologies are an improvement but without accelerating both the infrastructure provisioning and application development, IT is still not responsive enough for the business. Today, many organizations are experimenting with DevOps but to really move the needle, organizations must adopt DevOps at scale.
- Deliver new Platform-as-a-Service faster. Infrastructure-as-a-Service is the bare minimum for IT departments to remain relevant to the business. If IT cannot provide self-service on-demand IaaS, the business will go directly to the public cloud. To add more value to the IaaS baseline and accelerate application delivery, IT must deliver application platforms in a cloud model, i.e. self-service, on-demand, with elastic capacity.
Let’s start with this second key strategy: delivery new PaaS services faster. PaaS services include second generation platforms (database-as-a-service, application server-as-a-service, web server-as-a-service) as well as third generation platforms for cloud native applications such as Hadoop-as-a-service, Docker-as-a-service or Cloud Foundary-as-a-service.
In order to launch these new PaaS services faster, IT must have a well-defined service lifecycle that it can use to quickly and repeatably create these new services. What are the activities and what artifacts must be created in order to analyze, design, implement, operate and improve a service?
Once you have defined the service lifecycle, you can launch parallel teams to create the new service: platform-as-a-service, database-as-a-service, or X-as-a-service where X can be anything. Each service can be requested via the self-service catalog, delivered on demand, and treated like “code” so it can be versioned with the application build.
Each service needs a single point of accountability – the Service Owner. The service owner is responsible for the full lifecycle of the service. They are part of the Cloud Services team, or also called the Cloud Tenant Operations team. The Cloud Services Team also manages the service catalog, provides the capability to automate provisioning, and manages the operational health of the services.
The Cloud Services Team is underpinned by the Cloud Infrastructure Team. This team combines cross-functional expertise from compute, storage and network to create the profiles or resource pools that the cloud services are built on. The Cloud Infrastructure Team is also responsible for capacity management and security management. The team not only manages the internal private cloud, but also the enterprise’s consumption of the public cloud, transforming IT into a service broker.
Now that we’ve described the new cloud operating model, let’s return to the first key strategy for increasing the speed of IT: deliver more applications using DevOps. Many organizations have tasks one or two applications teams to pilot DevOps practices such as continuous integration and continuous deployment. This is a good starting point, however, in order to expand DevOps at scale so IT can provide a measurable time-to-market impact for the business, we need to make the adoption easier and more systematic.
The DevOps enablement team is a shared services team that provides consulting services to the other app dev teams; contains the expertise in automation so that other app dev teams do not need to become the expert in Puppet, Chef, or VMware CodeStream; and, this team drives a consistent approach across all app dev teams to avoid a fragmented approach to DevOps.
Remember how we talked about expanding PaaS? With self-service on-demand PaaS provisioning, app dev teams can build environment-as-a-service: an application blue print that contains multiple VMs (the database server, application server, web server, etc.) Environment-as-a-service lets app dev teams treat infrastructure like code, helping them adopt continuous deployment best practices by linking software versions to infrastructure versions.
By delivering more applications using DevOps and by delivering new PaaS services faster, you can increase the speed of IT.
Reg Lo is the Director of VMware Accelerate Advisory Services and is based in San Diego, CA. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.
